Note 33 — THE FRIAR VIEWPOINT

This gives us the key to the fatal results obtained in education in Filipinas. Of the hundreds of students who matriculated annually in the colleges, fifteen per cent did not succeed in obtaining the degree of bachelor, and if those who gained a professional title in the university scarcely reached ten per cent, and of them the greater number were advocates without clients, and physicians without patients, they, united with those who abandoned their books and mutilated their career, were in the villages the greatest calamity that befell the country. They all pompously called themselves pilósopos for filósofos [i.e., philosophers], and they were no more than ignorant and presuming fellows, pettifoggers, intriguers, and lazy, haughty, and vain fellows, who neither could nor would work, or aid their parents in work or trade, but could dress as those in Manila, prink themselves out like women, censuring everything, even the religious acts, in order that they might be esteemed sages. They were, through their vices, a grievous weight to the parish priests; by their laziness and viciousness, an insupportable burden to their families; by their lewdness and intrigues the mine which furnished suits to the lawyers, and for the disaffected and filibuster, as they were almost all of them affiliated with freemasonry, a danger to the government and to the nation.33 All those evil students learned all the evil of the capitals and laden with vices, evil ideas, and morals, they were in the villages a scandal for the majority, a snare for some, and mischievous for all.